Andrés Ruzo first heard about the Boiling River from his Peruvian grandfather, who shared a legend with him when he was a kid about the Lost City of Gold in Peru. “One of the details of the story was a ‘river that boils,’” Ruzo recalls.

Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman/National Center for Imaging and Microscopy Research

Biologist Craig Venter and his team just announced that, after years of failure, they have finally figured out the minimum number of genes necessary to create a living, stripped-down version of a cell.

Venter, who is founder of both the J. Craig Venter Institute and Synthetic Genomics Inc., has been working to create a version of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides with only the bare minimum of genetic instructions required for life. As it turns out, he says, at least 473 genes are essential to sustain life in a lab.

Towering 2,000 feet above its surroundings in the southern Peruvian Andes, the Cerro Baúl mesa stands alone in a sun-baked, arid mountain zone. It was here that the Wari culture, a mighty empire that predated the Incas, built a colony — and a massive brewery.

“The Wari were one of the earliest expansive states in the Andes,” says anthropologist Patrick Ryan Williams. “They emerged in the central highlands of Peru some time before 600 AD. … At the height of their reign they actually held sway over an area 800 miles along the Andes."

How do you get a cancer cell to gobble up a ball of anticancer drugs and for a direct kill? Cancer researcher Mauro Ferrari says he and his team have finally figured out how to elude a tumor cell’s defenses.

And he says the method works well on hard-to-target metastatic tumors, too.

“The vast majority of deaths due to cancer are because of metastasis — that is when the cancer spreads from the primary organ to the lungs and the liver, primarily,” Ferrari says. “That is the thing that ... nobody’s been able to cure yet despite great advances in the last 20 to 25 years.”